A MAN ON A BRIDGE_BANGKOK

A Man on a Bridge_Bangkok is an open studio in which artist Gérard Mermoz, working as curator, will present the activities of A Man [who lives] on A Bridge [in] Bangkok. This homeless man dwells near H Gallery and produces remarkable objects assembled from junk which he discards as soon as completed.

Unlike professional artists who aim to achieve international recognition this man, from the margins of society, invites us to reflect about the place and use-value of creativity for the individual; before cultural elites appropriate it and turn it into polite, rarefied ‘cults’ for the few.

Drawing from his experience as an artist, a historian and curator, Mermoz presents four ‘works’ by A Man on A Bridge; staging them as hermeneutic fictions – floating traces and relics of uncharted personal ‘rituals’ – without seeking to provide a ‘truth’ about them.

Documentation, presented in the form of photos and texts – thoughts in progress – aid visitors in formulating questions and invites them to respond to the objects freely and ponder over the circumstances of their making while adding their voice to the open studio.

The displays may evoke, in turn, the cult of relics, cabinets of curiosities, collections, scientific specimens, museum displays or art installations. This hybridizing is deliberate: to draw attention to and debunk the rhetoric of ‘Art’ displays; to expose and demystify the reification and commodification of the ‘Art’ object; and to celebrate these objects as the expression of a humanity and creativity confined to the margins.

No interpretation is offered here, only an invitation to body forth forms and attentive not to reduce the ‘author’ to an ‘It.’